The Little Ice Age and Revolution

An interesting climactic observation fromNASA: "A cold period that lasted from about A.D. 1550 to about A.D. 1850 in Europe, North America, and Asia. This period was marked by rapid expansion of mountain glaciers, especially in the Alps, Norway, Ireland, and Alaska. There were three maxima, beginning about 1650, about 1770, and 1850, each separated by slight warming intervals."

Charles I of England was executed in January, 1649, after which Oliver Cromwell rose to power.
The Americans signed their Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The French got a late start in 1789, but a couple decades of crop failures and food shortages are undoubtedly to blame.
Revolutions and political upheavals swept Europe in 1848. " It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history... The revolutionary wave began in France in February, and immediately spread to most of Europe and parts of Latin America. Over 50 countries were affected..."

The Russian Revolution, of course, was also prompted by suffering, death, and starvation, thought most likely due to World War I, rather than climate.

Some of these revolutions turned out well. Some turned out terribly. The Americans were quite lucky to have George Washington, and the Russians terribly unlucky to have Lenin and Stalin. But the Americans also had better access to land to feed their families, and no reactionary counter-revolution to deal with. The leaders of the French Revolution took advantage of the instability to reform the state, but (as far as I can tell,) could do little about the country's biggest problem, lack of food. The new government never had a chance. (As for the English, well, I don't know enough about the 1600s to really comment.)

When man is starving, the political order loses legitimacy and the wealthy--the folks with food--become his first targets.

Kings and States

I confess I have generally thought of the European past, excluding the classical era, as filled with 'kings' (occasionally queens) ruling what we might call 'states'. Of course I maintained some vague awareness that Odysseus, King of Ithaca, might be better called a baron, but I didn't give it much thought beyond that.

Anyway, so I'm reading Historian on the Edge's essay, The Crisis of State, about W. Europe in the late classical/early Medieval period, not very far in, and he says two things which strike at my ignorance:

"...to call western polities after 600 'states' is to rob the word state of any analytical value."
Not states. The political entities we are dealing with in this period are not states--and that from a guy who seems to know his stuff.

"There will be a weak and a strong thesis to this paper. The weak thesis is that a crisis of the state occurred around 600; that changes took place which compelled a real shake up in the ways in which central and local power interacted, a critical moment which, whether or not it did, at least could have produced a breakdown of the state. A supplementary to the weak thesis is that these changes killed off the ‘Roman World’ that is still so visible in, say, 525-30.3 One might entitle this ‘weak thesis’ ‘the end of the late antique state in the West’. The ‘strong thesis’ is that the result of these changes was the end of political formations that can usefully be analysed as states in any way. With a slight but important change in the word order, the strong thesis can be entitled ‘the end of the state in the late antique West’.

"As a corollary, it is probably not surprising that government continued in recognisably Roman fashion. For all that we are used to conceiving of them as ‘Germanic’ kingdoms in this period, it is very difficult indeed to find much that can cogently be called Germanic or even barbarian. Certainly there were new elements in western rulership but these developed within a distinctively late imperial framework. It is worth remembering how new kingship was and the extent to which it was being made up by political actors as they went along. It may also be that even as late as the early sixth century it was not regarded as a permanent or even ideal solution to the problems thrown up by the fifth century, even by those occupying royal thrones."

Kingship was new.

Goodness. I'd never thought of it that way before. I mean, were there kings in the pre-classical era? Significant ones? Surely nothing on the scale of Queen Elisabeth I or Louie the XIV. I suppose most areas were governed by tribal chieftains, though some places (Ireland comes immediately to mind, having not been significantly influenced by Rome or the barbarian invasions,) had "high kings". What exactly makes one a king, and not a chief or a sultan or an emperor? Does the terminology matter, other than perhaps denoting something about the size of the territory under governance?

I suppose I should read on.